One Step Behind
by Miss Mayinga
Summary: After Sasazuka's death, Todoroki starts trying to pick up the loose ends. Sicks complicates things by being horrible and creepy at her. There is much mindfuckery and nightmare fuel. Surprisingly enough, not nearly as funny as it sounds.


**Warnings: Some gore and implied violence in this chapter. Also, mentions of character death, but that should be obvious.**

* * *

It's rare for Todoroki to get this upset over crime scene pictures. If she looks back and thinks about it, then sure, she realizes that every corpse she sees must have been _someone_ once - but that never really occurs to her while she's working. She's never been particularly good at dealing with the human tragedies of the job, anyway, and it's so much easier to just pull back, overlook the shattered lives and grieving families and focus on trajectories and barrel grooves and reconstructions.

But pulling back isn't really an option right now. It's not just another anonymous stiff this time, it's her senior officer, it's Mr. Sasazuka, it's _Eishi_ – and as much as she wants to, she can't look past that.

* * *

Really, it's all just been so _surreal. _Seeing his name printed on that manila folder on Chief Usui's desk, reading the endless eulogies for him in the local papers, watching while his desk gets cleared off : It's all been like a bad dream, not like something that's actually happening. She hasn't really been able to believe any of it – not the sobbing, panicky phonecall that they'd got from Miss Katsuragi, not the ambulance speeding past the building, not even the case file with her senior's name on that's began to make its uneasy way around the Homicide office.

* * *

Of course she opens it. All the guys are standing there, waiting for her to react, to swoon or scream or go into hysterics or something like some stupid little girl - out of the corner of her eye, she can see that one of them has his coat off, ready to throw it over her in case she faints; another is trying to nonchalantly balance an extra cup of coffee for her. As the acrid smell of cheap, lousy office coffee hits her nostrils, she's taken back to the summer before, when, still new to the department and desperate to suck up, she'd brought Mr. Sasazuka coffee every morning, enduring the immature, misogynistic taunts (_hey newbie is that for sasazuka what's up with you anyway are you trying to sleep with him or something_) in hopes of being able to hoover her way up the office hierarchy.

Borne down upon on all sides by the empty pseudo-chivalry of her co-workers, she throws the file open in an act of sudden, defiant machismo, and begins flipping through idly, not entirely sure what she's trying to prove.

They disperse anyway. She keeps browsing for a few more minutes, hardly bothering to read any of the documents. As far as case files go, it's utterly normal, and as long as she doesn't look too closely, she can almost maintain the illusion that it's not actually _Mr. Sasazuka_ that the file's about, that it's some other poor shmuck with the same name, maybe. A few minutes is all that she can take of it, though, and when the day eventually ends, she makes sure to grab it as she leaves, intending to leave it on the chief's desk and never think about it again.

* * *

The picture falls out while she's walking down the hall. She picks it up out of obsessive neatness, then immediately wishes she hadn't – but it's too late; she's already seen his body: already seen the bloody mess where his head should be, already seen his name in neat red ink at the bottom, already seen that _oh god,_ he's wearing the tie that she gave him for Christmas last year...

* * *

And now she's crouched in a grungy little bathroom stall at the end of the row, wishing that she could just be sick and get this horrible feeling out of her gut...

* * *

And now she's checking into the capsule hotel by the station, too afraid to go home and see the group picture from the New Year's party on her wall...

* * *

And now she's lying in the mass-produced bed, and coming to the realization that any images she may have had of him are _gone, _and all that's left is that faceless, torn stump that resembles nothing she has ever known or loved...

* * *

And now she's asleep, hoping that tomorrow the world will make a bit more sense.

* * *

**I- um... I'm sorry for this, guys. orz Blame Schermionie, okay? She's the one who egged me on (and beta'd for me, and encouraged me, and generally made this thing readable.)**

**Editing to add: Now that this thing's up for the general public to read, I figure I might as well share a few of my own thoughts on it. To be honest, this chapter feels a bit too fast-paced to me now that I'm reading it on here. Partially it's because The Pit keeps eating my spacing (*shakes fist*), but it's also because I'm kinda crap at slowing things down plotwise. :P My instinct is always to take the shortest possible path from point A to point B, and obviously that doesn't always work out too hot stylistically. So, uh...sorry for that too, I guess. I'll try and work on it in the future.  
**

**Anyway, style issues aside, this chapter probably works best as a prelude/introduction to what's going to happen later on. I'm setting up Todoroki's ~Issues~, pretty much.  
**


End file.
